The Mad Among Us By Gerald Grob

In the book “The Mad Among Us-A History of the Care of American’s Mentally Ill,” the author Gerald Grob, tells a very detailed accounting of how our mental health system in the United States has struggled to understand and treat the mentally ill population. It covers the many different approaches that leaders in the field of mental health at the time used but reading it was like trying to read a food label. It is regurgitated in a manner that while all of the facts are there, it lacks any sense humanity. While this may be more of a comment on the author or the style of the author, it also is telling of the method in which much of the policy and practice has come to be. It is hard to put together without some sense of a story to support the action.

In other words, the patient was sick because of his or her time in the institution. I find this interesting because without a more human telling of the story by Grob, it is hard to gauge if the psychosis of patients deteriorated in general with the length of stay in the institution and if because of this, did that impact the policies or methods of practice? I believe it would be similar to what they are finding now with the orphans of Romania in the 1980’s who were raised in institutions with only basic and minimal human contact and now are mostly homeless and unable to function in society or inmates in prison who have spent years behind bars and then are let go into the general population. History has proven that people struggle with trying to acclimate back into the general population. As a result of this by the 1980’s one-third of the homeless population in the United States were said to be seriously mentally ill. (PBS, "Timeline: Treatments for Mental